Twenty percent, flat, on everything. That number is not a rumor and it is not an estimate: OnlyFans writes it into section 10 of its own terms of service. What almost nobody tells you is what sits around it, including a clause that lets the platform take money back out of your account.
Last updated July 2026
Nobody negotiates OnlyFans down from 20%. What you can change is the number it takes 20% of. We promote adult creators, price the subs, unlocks and PPV properly, and keep the fans buying. Free, confidential application, a reply within 24 hours, and your logins and payouts stay yours.
OnlyFans takes 20% of every Fan Payment and you keep 80%. It is written in the terms of service, section 10, in one sentence: "Our Fee is calculated as 20% of the total Fan Payment and will be deducted from each Fan Payment." A Fan Payment is any payment tied to a Creator Interaction, which means subscriptions, tips, pay-per-view unlocks, paid messages and streams are all the same 20%. There is no second processing fee on top, and no OnlyFans-charged currency conversion fee either.
That last point is a correction, not a detail. A lot of pages ranking for this query tell you the effective rate is really 23% or 25% once "payment processing" is added. Read the terms and there is no such line. OnlyFans names exactly one fee. What it does do is disclaim third party charges: "All Fan Payments and Creator Earnings are transacted in USD. Your bank or e-wallet company may charge currency conversion or other fees. We do not control currency exchange rates, banking charges, or e-wallet provider charges. We and any Subsidiary are not responsible for paying such charges." Your bank might bill you. OnlyFans does not, and it is careful to say so.
So the honest headline is that the fee itself is simple. The complications are everywhere else: chargebacks that reach back into your balance, a payout minimum the terms admit to but refuse to name, and the tax bill that lands on the 80% after OnlyFans is done with it. All three are below, with the source for each.
A US creator, paid in USD. Every deduction below is sourced. Every line that is not a real fee is printed as $0.00 so you can see it is not there.
| Line | Amount | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Gross fan spend | $1,000.00 | Subscriptions, tips, PPV unlocks, paid messages, streams. The terms call all of it a "Fan Payment". |
| OnlyFans fee (20%) | -$200.00 | Terms of Service, section 10: "Our Fee is calculated as 20% of the total Fan Payment and will be deducted from each Fan Payment." |
| Second processing fee | $0.00 | There is no such line. OnlyFans charges one fee and the terms name only one fee. |
| Currency conversion by OnlyFans | $0.00 | The terms disclaim FX: "We do not control currency exchange rates, banking charges, or e-wallet provider charges." |
| Creator Earnings | $800.00 | Effective take rate: 20.0%. This figure is pre-tax and pre-chargeback. |
$1,000 gross becomes $800.00 in Creator Earnings. That is the whole platform cost, and it does not move with your product mix or your volume. Two things can still shrink the $800 after the fact, and only two: a chargeback (which OnlyFans can deduct from your side) and tax (which is not a platform fee at all, but is the biggest bite left). Both get their own section below. For the mechanics of getting the $800 from your OnlyFans balance into a US bank account, see our guide to how OnlyFans payouts work.
One rate covers everything. The terms do not define a subscription fee, a tip fee and a PPV fee. They define a Fan Payment, which is any payment related to a Creator Interaction, and then apply a single 20% to it. That is why the answer to every "does OnlyFans take more from X" question is the same answer: no, it takes 20%, the same as from everything else.
| Sale | OnlyFans keeps | You keep | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| A $9.99 monthly subscription | $2.00 | $7.99 | Rounded to the cent. 20% of $9.99 is $1.998. |
| A $10.00 monthly subscription | $2.00 | $8.00 | The cleanest example of the flat 20%. |
| A $50.00 PPV unlock | $10.00 | $40.00 | Same rate as a sub. PPV is not taxed harder. |
| A $100.00 tip | $20.00 | $80.00 | Tips are a Fan Payment. Same 20%. |
| A $25.00 paid DM | $5.00 | $20.00 | Paid messages are a Creator Interaction like any other. |
| $1,000.00 in mixed gross | $200.00 | $800.00 | One rate across every revenue type, so the blend is always 20%. |
20%, the same as everything else. A tip is a Fan Payment under the terms, so it carries the identical rate. A $100 tip leaves you $80.00. A $20 tip leaves you $16.00. There is no reduced tip rate, no bonus for generous fans, and no separate livestream tipping percentage. If you have read otherwise, that page is inventing policy OnlyFans has never published.
20% of the subscription price, every month it renews. A $10.00 sub pays you $8.00. A $9.99 sub pays you $7.99. The cut does not shrink on longer bundles or on rebills, and it does not scale with your subscriber count. Since the rate is fixed, your only lever is the price. Our guide to what to charge on OnlyFans covers where that price should sit.
Also 20%. A $50 PPV unlock nets you $40.00 and OnlyFans keeps $10.00. A $25 paid DM nets you $20.00. PPV is often described as the "high margin" product on the platform, and in a sense it is, but not because the fee is lower. The fee is identical. PPV just tends to produce more gross per fan, and 20% of a bigger number leaves you more.
No, and it does not take a smaller one either. There is no published tier, no negotiated rate and no enterprise discount. The creator earning $500 a month and the creator earning $500,000 a month pay the same 20% commission on every Fan Payment. That is unusual, and it is one of the few genuinely simple things about the platform.
This is the part of the terms that matters most and gets covered least. Verbatim: "If a Fan successfully seeks a refund or chargeback from their credit card provider of a Fan Payment, we may deduct an amount equal to the Creator Earnings portion of the refunded or chargedback amount."
Read that carefully, because two things follow from it. First, chargebacks are your exposure, not the platform's. You will find creator advice sites claiming OnlyFans "covers most legitimate chargebacks." The terms say the opposite: OnlyFans reserves the right to claw back your share. Second, the basis of the clawback is the Creator Earnings portion, meaning your net, not the gross. On a $50 unlock that a fan later disputes, the deduction is calculated on your $40, not on the $50. That is a meaningfully better deal than some platforms offer, and it is worth knowing precisely, because it is the difference between losing $40 and losing $50 on a single dispute.
The practical consequence is that a run of disputes can pull your balance down after you thought the money was banked, and there is no cap in the terms on how far back that reaches. The defense is boring and it works: deliver what you promised, describe unlocks accurately before the fan pays, keep receipts of what you sent and when, and do not sell customs you cannot fulfil on time. Our guide to OnlyFans chargebacks and how to prevent them goes through the patterns that trigger disputes and the habits that keep them rare.
Here is something we are not going to pretend to know. The terms confirm that a minimum exists, and then decline to say what it is: "To withdraw Creator Earnings from your OnlyFans account, your account balance must meet the minimum payout amount requirement." That sentence names a requirement without naming a number. OnlyFans does not publish the figure in its terms at all.
What third parties report, and where they disagree:
Around the minimum sit the other reported mechanics, all of which we flag as reported rather than published: a pending or hold period of roughly seven days (some sources say eight) before a balance becomes withdrawable, an additional hold on new accounts, and one to seven business days for money to land once you request it. US payout methods are commonly listed as direct bank transfer (ACH), wire, and e-wallets such as Paxum. None of that appears in the terms with dollar figures or day counts attached, which is exactly why you see so many different versions of it online. The full breakdown, with the same sourcing discipline, is in our OnlyFans payout guide.
OnlyFans publishes separate referral program terms, and unlike the payout minimum they are specific. Refer a creator and you earn "five per cent (5%) of Fan Payments generated by the Referred Creator in the twelve months after the Referred Creator's registration date," capped at "up to a maximum referral payment of US$50,000 per Referred Creator." Payments land on or around the first day of the next calendar month.
The restrictions are where people get burned, so read them before you build anything on top of this. You cannot refer yourself, and accounts you own or operate are excluded, which kills the obvious scheme. You are not eligible if your account is suspended, terminated or deleted, so a ban does not just cost you your page, it cancels the referral income attached to it. And advertising your referral link on search engines, Google Ads included, is prohibited outright.
Note that the 5% is calculated on the referred creator's Fan Payments, which is the gross, not on their earnings. Twelve months of a productive referral is real money. It is also the only mechanism on the platform that pays you a percentage rather than charging you one.
OnlyFans withholds nothing. No federal income tax, no state tax, no payroll tax. You are an independent contractor, so the $800.00 from our example arrives whole and untaxed, and the entire liability is yours to settle. Treating that $800 as take-home is the single most expensive mistake new creators make.
Two layers come out of it. Self-employment tax is 15.3%, applied to 92.35% of your net earnings, which works out to roughly 14.13% effectively, and it lands before income tax does. Income tax then applies on top, and what it costs depends on your filing status, your bracket, your state and your deductions. We are deliberately not printing a single "final take-home" number here, because any page that gives you one is making up your tax situation. What we can tell you exactly is where the platform stops: $1,000 gross, $200 fee, $800 in Creator Earnings, pre-tax.
The reporting threshold is changing, and most articles on this topic have not caught up. Per the IRS instructions for Form 1099-NEC, the threshold is $600 for tax year 2025 (the form that arrives in early 2026) and rises to $2,000 for tax year 2026 earnings (the form arriving in early 2027), indexed for inflation from 2027 onward. Do not confuse this with the 1099-K and its $20,000 and 200 transaction thresholds. That is a different form, and it is not the one OnlyFans uses.
The critical part: a reporting threshold is not a tax-liability threshold. If you earn $1,500 in 2026 and no 1099-NEC arrives because you fell under the new $2,000 line, that money is still taxable and still reportable on Schedule C. The form is a copy sent to the IRS, not the thing that creates the obligation. Our OnlyFans tax guide covers deductions, quarterly estimates and record keeping, and our breakdown of the OnlyFans 1099 form walks through what arrives, when, and what to do if it never shows up. This is general information, not tax advice.
It is the category standard, not an outlier. Fansly publishes an 80% creator share, which is the same 20% expressed from the other end, so the two biggest names in adult subscriptions charge identically. Our breakdown of how much Fansly takes has the full arithmetic, and if you are weighing the two platforms rather than the two fee schedules, our OnlyFans vs Fansly comparison is the one to read. Choosing on take rate alone is choosing on a tie.
Where platforms actually differ is at the edges: whether a processing fee is stacked on top, whether refunds hit your net or the gross, how low the payout floor sits, and how long the money is held. Those are the lines that decide what your year looks like, and they are the lines nobody puts in a headline. Our master comparison of creator monetization platforms and their fees puts every take rate, minimum and payout speed on a single page so you can see the edges side by side.
The fee is the easy part. It is the clauses around the fee that cost people money.
The take rate is the one number on this page you cannot change. The gross is the one you can. We promote adult creators where their buyers already are, price the subs, unlocks and PPV so the 80% is worth having, and keep the fans renewing month after month. You keep your logins, your payouts and the large majority of what you earn. Here is how OnlyFans management works with us, and what to look for in any agency you are considering.
Apply to FansPromo freeOnlyFans takes 20%. Its terms of service state: "Our Fee is calculated as 20% of the total Fan Payment and will be deducted from each Fan Payment." You keep the other 80%, which the terms call your Creator Earnings. On $1,000 of gross fan spend, OnlyFans keeps $200.00 and you keep $800.00 before tax.
20 percent, flat, on every Fan Payment. There is no tiered rate, no volume discount for large accounts, and no separate percentage for any product. The 80/20 split is the same on your first $10 subscription and on your ten thousandth.
Yes, the same 20%. A tip is a Fan Payment under the terms, exactly like a subscription or a PPV unlock, so it carries the identical rate. A $100 tip leaves you $80.00. Anyone who tells you tips pay out at a better rate is guessing.
No. The terms name one fee and only one fee. What the terms do say is that your own bank or e-wallet may charge you for conversion or transfer, and that OnlyFans is "not responsible for paying such charges." That is a third party cost, not an OnlyFans fee, and on a domestic USD transfer it is usually zero.
You make $8.00. OnlyFans takes $2.00, which is 20% of $10.00. On the more common $9.99 price point the fee is $2.00 and you keep $7.99. That $8.00 is pre-tax: you are an independent contractor, so self-employment tax and income tax come out of it later.
Yes, it can. The terms state that if a fan successfully seeks a refund or chargeback, OnlyFans "may deduct an amount equal to the Creator Earnings portion of the refunded or chargedback amount." So on a $50 disputed unlock, the deduction is based on your $40 net, not the $50 gross. Any page claiming OnlyFans absorbs chargebacks for you is wrong.
The terms confirm a minimum exists but never state the figure: "your account balance must meet the minimum payout amount requirement." Third party sources commonly report $20, and wire minimums are reported inconsistently between $100 and $200. Sources also disagree on whether the $20 is still enforced. Treat $20 as a working assumption, not a published policy.
No. OnlyFans withholds nothing. You are self-employed, so your 80% arrives untaxed and the liability is yours. For tax year 2025 the 1099-NEC reporting threshold is $600, and for tax year 2026 earnings it rises to $2,000. The threshold only controls whether a form is issued: every dollar is taxable and reportable on Schedule C either way.
One last thing, plainly. The 20% is not the reason a creator earns badly, and the 80% is not the reason one earns well. The rate is the same for everybody on the platform, it is the same as the nearest competitor charges, and it has not moved. What decides your month is how many people are buying and at what price. If the 20% is the number you are stuck on, you are staring at the one variable you cannot touch.
Holds, minimums, methods and how long the money really takes to land.
TaxSchedule C, self-employment tax, deductions and quarterly estimates.
Fee comparisonEvery major platform's cut, minimum and payout speed, on one page.
Captions, bios, DM scripts, tip menus, pricing and more, generated in seconds. No card needed.